Coffee, Sun & Technology

For quite some time now I’ve been using analytical tools to slice and dice user data on “small sites” (Wambo gets about 50K visits a month roughly, and I have 2 other small B2C service sites that I’m managing on the side). In doing so, I’ve realized that the kinds of metrics you look at for these sites that need to grow fast are very different from traditional analytics.

While traditional sites look at “improving” existing business processes (increasing conversion rates, enhancing the customer experience, etc etc ), startup sites are laser-focused on finding the right formula for their site or service. Startups are always building. And speed is what matters.

For us early stage sites, we look at a completely different set of numbers. And, we compare data ALL the time. Month-over-month, week-over-week, even sometimes, hour-over-hour. So I’m thinking of another kind of analytics that’d be useful for me, let’s call that growth analytics. In an ideal interface, I’d like everything presented in the context of velocity. Velocity been the uber measure, similar to a session or a page view in traditional web analytics.

I’d want to see user acquisition velocity by hour, day, week and month. I’d like to be able to compare velocities for different time ranges (this week vs last week). I want to be able to track acquisition velocity  for different segments. I want to A/B test my site and see what the impact is on the velocity metrics. And I want to project in the future what my KPIs will look like if I can sustain the current velocity levels (i.e. if I keep growing my users by 3% a week, that will get me to the 1Million user mark by ___). A new calendar type but with dates in the future too, not just in the past.

Yes, you see where I’m going now. I think what’s a little broken with the state of analytics today is the fact that we spend 90% of our time trying to answer the “what happened” question. And that’s soooo yesterday

A month doesn’t go by without a Marketing Manager, Director or even VP asking me if they should or should not use Google Analytics on their retail or content site. After the initial wave of sites which moved to Google Analytics when it was made free in 2005, there seems to be a new wave of larger sites now wondering what to do.

Whether this is part of the normal Web analytics space consolidation cycle, or simply the “question du jour” remains to be seen. But I think there is a bigger story here. The chasm is widening between eMarketers on one side, and Web analysts on the other. Web analytics tools keep gettting more and more complicated, to the point where some of the folks out there are simply asking the question: “Can we go back to a tool that’s less complicated?”.

So my personal opinion on the matter is: In 99% of the cases, more reports won’t help. In 99% of the cases, less will be more, and therefore, and yes, you should try Google Analytics.

Usually at that time of the dicussion I get a list of objections, which are:

Objection 1 (most common): We don’t want Google to have access to our site data. We spend ridiculous amounts of money with them, and we are afraid of them using this information against us.

Answer: Google’s got a good track record for business integrity and given their dominant position, I think this is a low risk. In fact, what information could they possibly use, and for what reason? Yes, they could figure out where you’re also buying your clicks from, and the volumes. Then decide to discount or not discount your click costs based on the information. But would that make a huge difference to them anyways? They own the SEM market, and pretty much have all the pricing power they want already.

Objection 2: Google Analytics’ too simple for our business needs.

Answer: While it’s possible that Google Analytics might not meet all your business requirements, it’s highly unlikely. For one, the GA has a pretty competitive featureset. But most importantm, this goes back to the classic mistake buyers make when evaluating Web analytics vendors: i.e. picking the tool which has the most reports and the flashiest UI’s — and ignoring the most important part of the Web analytics equation: people. It’s the people who will make your analytics investment work, not the tools.

Objection 3: Google doesn’t have support.

Answer: I don’t have any information on this. But I’ve used GA for the last 3-4 years now and I haven’t seen many bugs lately (they’ve been very good fixing their initial problems).

Objection 4: Google doesn’t have professional services.

Answer: They don’t but they have certified professional. And if you’re looking for Web analytics services, there are plenty of Web analytics consulting boutiques out there. I have too many friends in this industry to start a list here — but if you’re looking for names, drop me an email and I’ll help you.

Objection 5 (hot question these days): Should we run them side by side with Omniture?

Answer: IT folks will argue that having Omniture and GA side by side will slow down the page (you’re adding to the page load with another JS that’s typically 15-20KB). I think that’s a fair statement. I frequently see pages waiting for the google-analytics.com server response (typically people running multiple analytics technologies), which impacts page performance but also the accuracy of your reports. On the other hand, the average page size is now over 200KB, and another Web analytics tag certainly isn’t going to all of the sudden kill your site.

And my final words of wisdom… Everybody that’s been in this industry long enough knows that people are the critical success factor in any Web analytics project. My recommendation is to under-invest in tools, over-invest in people. That’s what’s going to make it all work.

Now that I’ve cleared this question, can you ask me about my new video commerce startup instead next time we meet at a cocktail ?

These days I’m running into more and more eMarketing folks with engineering backgrounds. I think this happens for a couple of reasons. First, e-business is about efficiency. Online you can track the effectiveness of your campaigns, promotions, changes in site design. Something you can’t do easily in the offline world. So it’s not too surprising to find people who can crunch numbers taking key roles in companies - even in the Marketing departments. Second, we live in a Google world. Google has become such a powerful force in e-marketing that it was able to push its spread its analytical/math based culture on to their partners and customers. It’s all about results as they say.

Coming from an analytical background, I certainly am happy to see this happening. As long as analytical folks realize they still need to work hand-in-hand with their more creative counterparts, this is a promising evolution.

Here’s a bonus… eBags.com first sketch, dated 1998, from Jon Nordmark and Peter Cobb.

Friends have asked why we use Google Analytics rather than Fireclick for analytics on the Wambo.com Web site. Reasons are:

(1) It’s not just “my” decision. We have a dozen people working here at Wambo and I am not the one making these decisions.

(2) On the return on investment, including the hours we had to spend deploying the tags, reading the reports, etc, Google Analytics is unbeatable.

(3) We’re number junkies but know where to stop. Multidimensional path analysis, etc are great features but at the end of the day we can boil it down to 4 or 5 KPIs that can be easily computed with GA on a daily basis.

So yes, we use Google Analytics for Wambo.com and we are very happy with it. And to be clear, this isn’t about GA vs Fireclick but more generally, about GA vs any expensive analytics package out there.

Wambo conversion rates (percentage of visits to downloads) from Google Analytics

Nice trend, isn’t it?

Frankly I don’t believe this is just the result of the 3 or 4 things we’ve done on the site to increase our conversions - but generally speaking, our optimization efforts are paying off. Big lesson: less is more.

By the way, I’ll try to post more of these in the future and share some of the lessons.